Bus-train Crash Blame Goes Around

Officials Point Fingers For Not Fixing Crossing In Fox River Grove

January 19, 1996|By Steve Mills, Tribune Staff Writer.

At the moment when a Metra train slammed into a Cary-Grove High School bus, Fox River Grove Police Chief Robert Polston and Illinois Department of Transportation signal engineer Bob McWilliams were at that troubled Algonquin Road crossing.

At the very same moment, an electrical technician named Jim Condro, whose company works for IDOT, was 900 feet away at the Lincoln Avenue crossing, another troubled site.

Both parties were trying to get to the root of problems that had plagued the crossings for some time. But neither knew that the other was there.

In a way, the morning of Oct. 25 is emblematic of the days, the weeks and the months leading up to the crash that killed seven students and injured two dozen others that day.

For as much as officials from the various agencies and companies tried to understand and correct the problems at the Algonquin Road crossing, they never did.

One reason may be because of the failure to communicate.

On the second of three days of a National Transportation Safety Board hearing into the crash, the emotion of Wednesday's session in Crystal Lake gave way to a more technical gathering Thursday as investigators dug into the nuts and bolts of the crossing's electrical systems.

But as they made that dry and often stultifying inquiry, finger-pointing over who, if anyone, is to blame for the crash emerged and began to overtake the hearing.

Union Pacific Railroad officials said they passed on to Condro complaints that drivers on Algonquin Road did not have enough time to clear the crossing.

"There's no legal requirement to notify IDOT," said Roy Chuchna, the chief counsel for Union Pacific, "but we told the people who did the maintenance."

Condro, who works for Contracting & Materials Co., said he had passed on the concerns to IDOT's McWilliams.

"I was really looking for a little direction on what to do," Condro said after testifying.

IDOT officials, though, said McWilliams never heard of the concerns.

"Had we known, we would have gone out there and tried to correct the situation," said Edward R. Gower, chief counsel for IDOT. "If we know there's an anomaly, we'll go out and investigate it."

NTSB officials hope their inquiry, conducted in a most well-mannered yet determined way, will help them find the cause of the accident. They hope, too, that it will result in a series of safety recommendations that will have national implications.

Already, changes have been made--even among the parties involved in this investigation. While they trade charges about what happened before the crash, Union Pacific and IDOT officials say that since the crash they have put into place a system so that they share information with each other, as well as with the Illinois Commerce Commission.

The commission, according to the officials, will be a clearinghouse of sorts.

Still, they were unable to explain how, between Jan. 1, 1995, and the day of the crash, four complaints about there being too little time to clear that crossing could be reported without all of the agencies sharing information and working together.

Said IDOT's Gower: "The other way of looking at it is that you had some pretty committed people trying to figure out what's going on at that crossing."

Indeed, on the morning of the crash, Condro was at the nearby Lincoln Avenue crossing on his own time, arriving 20 minutes before his shift started.

When the train struck the bus, he was inside the electrical shed looking at the systems, trying to understand a problem that had begun to gnaw at him.

Unlike Polston, however, Condro did not witness the accident.

"I didn't hear it. I didn't see it," he said. "I'm in the train box."

IDOT officials, who spent close to two hours testifying Thursday, cited another instance where they believed they had not been fully informed about how the Fox River Grove crossings were maintained.

They, as well as Condro, said they were unaware of changes made to a piece of equipment in the system that transmits a warning of an oncoming train to the highway traffic equipment. The change, according to the testimony, was made by the railroad and involved cutting the warning time to 25 seconds from 30 seconds--although officials suspect the system might not always have delivered the full 25 seconds--a national railway standard.

Whether that affected the highway signals, however, is unclear. Forrest H. Ballinger, a signal specialist for the Missouri company that makes the equipment, said that if the equipment is "dialed down" to call for a shorter warning period, as officials said it was, the effect would be negligible on the traffic systems.

By the end of Thursday's session, though, changes in the warning system were eclipsed by the matter of who had been aware of the problems at the intersection.

That the finger-pointing took on such importance angered victims' families, some of whom viewed Thursday's session as little more than an exercise in "trying to prove that it's just not my fault," said Rick Robinson, whose son Shawn was killed in the accident.

"I don't think anybody wanted to say it was their fault," he said. "I think it was kind of like that because fixing the problem would have been easy."

Robinson said that all the parties had to do was start to talk.

"This was a communication problem, pure and simple," he said. "They just weren't talking to each other, and maybe they could have rectified the problem if they had all sat down with each other."